Netflix Releases Results, Adds 10 Million New Streaming Members

Just in from Netflix is their latest letters to shareholders, here's what they had to say:

We added more than 2 million members in Q4 to end the year with over 27 million domestic members. Our holiday season was particularly strong, driven by consumers buying new electronic devices, including tablets and smart TVs. Both voluntary and involuntary retention improved in Q4. The increase in involuntary retention was due to improvements in how we process payments and recover those members on payment hold. We believe the gains in voluntary retention stemmed from steady improvements in service and content relative to the broad array of video choices available to consumers, as shown by the continued growth in our median hours viewed per member. Contribution margin continued to climb in Q4, expanding sequentially 210 basis points to 18.5%. Our outperformance relative to our target of 100 basis points of margin expansion per quarter was driven by higher than forecasted members and revenue and lower than forecasted content delivery costs. Starting this quarter, you'll see that we expanded our segment disclosures to break out marketing and cost of revenues.

We've been investing in making our service better with increased spending on content, which helps both retain and attract members, and have been able to trim marketing spending yet maintain strong net additions. Our target remains to expand contribution margin on average about 100 basis points per quarter. We anticipate domestic streaming contribution profit will, for the first time ever, be larger than DVD contribution profit (and up about 90% year over year) in Q1. Regarding domestic streaming content, we announced in Q4 that we will be the exclusive "Pay 1" home for theatrical releases from the Walt Disney Studio starting in 2016. While we've done similar major studio Pay 1 deals before (e.g. Paramount in Canada, Warner Bros. in the Nordics, and Lionsgate in the U.K. and Ireland), and will do more in the future, the Disney deal is particularly significant because it is our first Pay 1 deal with a major studio in the U.S. and because of the strength of the Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm titles. 2016 is a long way off, and in the meantime, we are adding lots of other great films and TV shows, including a wide assortment of family films from the Disney catalog. More recently, we signed a deal with Warner Bros., the largest TV producer in the world, bringing exclusively to Netflix complete previous seasons of popular on-air serialized dramas such as "Revolution" on NBC and "The Following" on Fox. This deal is significant because we are licensing directly from the producer, rather than the networks on which these shows air, allowing us to bring previous seasons to Netflix earlier than traditional network deals have accommodated. This type of license agreement plays right to our sweet spot. When it comes to highly serialized TV series, Netflix 3 offers an amazingly better experience than any other alternative as members can start right from season one, episode one and watch episodes how and when they feel like it. In terms of domestic competition, TV Everywhere, including HBO GO, continues to improve, and linear TV distributors clearly see the benefit of offering Internet TV. This competition for viewing time will increase over the next several years, as we have long predicted, as consumers come to expect Internet TV on demand viewing for all their video entertainment. More narrowly, Amazon Prime, Redbox Instant, and Hulu also offer low-cost streaming offerings, and they have some of the same content that Netflix has, as well as some unique content. The more unique content they have (for example, "Battleground" and "Community" on Hulu, or "Falling Skies" and "The Closer" on Amazon Prime), the more they are a different service than ours. To the degree they have some of the same content as Netflix, they are potentially a substitute for Netflix.

To examine this, we looked atthe top 200 titles on Netflix: our 100 most popular movies and our 100 most popular TV shows in Q4. Of these 200, 113 are not on Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus or Redbox Instant. Of the 87 that are available on at least one of these services, Hulu Plus offers 27 of the 200; Amazon Prime 73 of the 200; and Redbox Instant 12 of the 200, with significant overlap in TV between Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, and in movies between Amazon Prime and Redbox Instant. In other words, when it comes to the most popular content with members on Netflix, none of these services are good substitutes to Netflix.4 Like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu are moving towards increasing exclusives and original series, and over time as a group we are likely to compete more like Showtime and HBO do today. In the U.K. this is already the case: Sky NOW TV, LOVEFiLM, and Netflix have very limited overlapping content. The same holds true in the Nordics among the various services. In such a world, our originals will be a great asset. When it comes to competition, we not only have a superior content offering due to our larger budget, but we are further along the experience curve when it comes to improving our user interface and delivering great quality streaming. For all of these reasons, Netflix continues to add members rapidly. Earlier this year, the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, was modernized and now allows U.S. members to share what they are watching on Netflix with their friends on an ongoing basis. Our members will now be able to choose to have "friends rows" within the Netflix user interface for friends they have agreed to share viewing with. Our default settings will not auto-post to Facebook timeline, but members will be able to post to Facebook specific titles they are passionate about.

We are excited to roll these features out in the U.S. in the next few months. Looking forward, we expect this year's Q1 net additions to be slightly higher than last year's Q1 net additions of 1.7 million. The fact that our growth remains this strong despite intensifying competition, and our already substantial U.S. market penetration, underlines the large opportunity ahead. As a reminder, we detailed in our April 2012 Investor Letter how unchanged seasonality of gross adds would, due to the larger size of our existing subscriber base, result in increased seasonality of net additions. Thus we would expect fewer net additions in Q2 2013 than in Q2 2012, because Q2 is our seasonally lightest quarter. That said, we anticipate the fourth season of "Arrested Development" to debut in Q2, and that could bring us higher than otherwise expected membership.

International

During the quarter, we grew to over 6 million international members, as people around the world discover the benefits of Netflix. Our total international contribution loss of $105 million in Q4 was, as expected, higher than the prior quarter international loss of $92 million, owing to the incremental costs associated with our launch in the Nordic countries. The Q4 loss was lower, however, than our guidance midpoint of a $113 million loss, due primarily to the higher than expected growth of international subscriptions and revenue. Over the course of this year, we expect to see declining losses in our current international markets as member growth exceeds growth in content spending. With a Q1 guidance midpoint of $87 million in international losses, we expect a sequential improvement of $18 million, with more modest sequential improvements expected in subsequent quarters. 5 For the first half of 2013, we aren't planning to launch additional international markets. We are evaluating several expansion markets for late 2013 or 2014, but have not made any decisions yet. Our launch in the Nordics was very successful, confirming our belief in the large international opportunity for our service. In Latin America, we've made steady progress on our consumer payment infrastructure. In Brazil, we've recently launched a direct debit consumer payment option with several major banks ("Débito Automático") and are testing the uniquely Brazilian form of payments known as Boleto Bancário. In Mexico, we've made progress in enabling debit cards for Netflix which has to be done in some cases bank-by-bank.Over 50 million households pay for residential broadband in Latin America, over half the U.S. number, so this region is a massive opportunity for us. In Q4, the 2012 hit film "The Hunger Games" debuted on our Canadian service, with much success, just as it had a few months prior on our Latin America service. In Q1, it will debut on our U.K. and Ireland services, followed by the U.S. The multi-territorial success of "The Hunger Games" on Netflix shows the value that an international programming platform like Netflix offers content brands, and underlines how such broad international reach remains unique.

In addition to competition from local broadcasters and distributors with TV Everywhere-type products, and from piracy, we face many pure-play competitors around the world, including Clarovideo, Sky NOW TV, HBO Nordics, Amazon LOVEFiLM, Viaplay, and others. Our estimates from Internet data flows and other sources suggest we lead all of them in both viewing and revenue. We have a large and growing membership base to invest against, and our R&D effort is more substantial than our competitors, allowing us to provide a better and faster-evolving user experience that gives members the ability to find great series and films to watch, no matter the territory. Given this heightened competition, we'll say a little less about country by country results than in the past, to avoid inadvertently helping our competitors. Long-term international success for Netflix is consumer adoption and contribution margins at the levels of our domestic market. Progress towards that can be seen quarterly in our growing international membership and declining international losses. Original Series We believe that February 1st will be a defining moment in the development of Internet TV. On that day, we will release all 13 episodes of "House of Cards" in all of our markets, allowing our members the freedom to immerse themselves when and how they want in the world created by David Fincher and his stars Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.6 Imagine if books were always released one chapter per week, and were only briefly available to read at 8pm on Thursday. And then someone flipped a switch, suddenly allowing people to enjoy an entire book, all at their own pace. That is the change we are bringing about. That is the future of television.

That is Internet TV.

Stepping back, we have three major types of streaming content on Netflix:

1. Movies from one to fifty years old

2. Prior seasons of current TV shows and complete prior season of off-air TV shows

The first category, movies, is where we started. Then, over the last few years, we've greatly expanded our offering in the second category, prior-season TV, with a particular emphasis on serialized drama. Such shows were struggling to find a consistent economic return on linear TV, whereas for us they work great, playing directly into the way that people actually prefer to watch such shows. Original series are a third type of content to attract and retain members. Because original series can be completely exclusive to Netflix (no TVOD, no linear, no kiosks, no theaters) we believe they will be more effective in attracting and retaining members than equivalent content that is less exclusive to Netflix. We believe original series developed for Internet TV will be better for creators, better for consumers, and better for Netflix. A large on-demand service has fundamental advantages in producing and launching new series.